The Return of Pay-As-You-Throw Voters make their trash pick and OK budgets, new-school bond

By Shawn P. Sullivan

Sanford News Editor

Thursday, June 13, 2013

SANFORD — On the whole, voters were in an approving mood on Tuesday, picking “Pay As You Throw” for the city’s trash-metering program, passing the city and school budgets, and green-lighting a bond for the proposed new high school and technical center.

This is the first time, under the new city charter, that voters decided whether the municipal and school budgets should pass as proposed; the ballot-booth replaced the representative town meeting that Sanford convened every May for years. Town Clerk Sue Cote announced the unofficial tallies in an email sent to local newspapers at around 9:30 on Tuesday night and made them official on Wednesday morning.

Article 1 on Tuesday’s ballot asked voters if Sanford should adopt the 2013-2014 budget proposed by the newly formed Sanford Budget Committee and OK’d by the Sanford City Council earlier this year. Voters said “yes,” with a vote of 828 to 721, or 52 percent to 46 percent. Thirty voters, or roughly 2 percent, left the question blank.

Article 2 asked voters if the city should approve the school department’s proposed budget for the coming fiscal year. The school budget passed, 892 to 666, or 56 percent to 42 percent, with 21 voters leaving the question unanswered.

The city budget is $20,747,499 for municipal services, debt service, libraries and outside agencies, while the school one is $34,732,963. Sanford’s share of the county tax is $856,817, and a total of $2,167,669 is designated for capital reserves for both the city and schools.

This approved total budget of $58,504,989 means a 78-cent increase — or 4.03 percent — in Sanford’s mil rate, which is currently $19.32 per $1,000 of valuation. The mil rate is the amount per thousand dollars of a property’s value in which a tax rate is assessed.

Voters also decided to stick with using the referendum validation process for the school department’s proposed budgets for at least the next three years. Article 3, which proposed this option, got 1,093 “yes” votes, or 66 percent of the final tally, and 455 “no” votes, or 29 percent. Thirty-one voters opted not to answer this question.

Referendum Question One asked voters to pick one of two trash-metering projects — Pay As You Throw (PAYT) or More in Return (MIR). The majority of voters went with PAYT over MIR, 637 to 624, a slim margin of 40.3 percent to 39.5 percent, respectively. A total of 318 voters — 20 percent — left the question blank, likely signaling the disapproval of residents who prefer neither program. The city council sparked some criticism this spring when it decided to ask voters to pick one of the two programs but did not give them the option to choose “neither” during Tuesday’s referendum.

The PAYT pick, however slim over MIR, is a reversal of fortune for the program. In 2010, the then-town council implemented the program in July as a means to boost recycling and lower the costs of disposing of the community’s waste. A group of citizens filed a petition against the council’s action, however, and months later, voters overwhelmingly repealed PAYT during the November election.

Under PAYT, residents now will be required to purchase special bags in which to dispose of their trash. The intention of the program is to prompt residents to conserve on those bags — to get the most bang for their buck — and recycle more. If residents recycle more, the city will spend less on disposing of the community’s trash.

During the four months that PAYT was in effect in 2010, residents more than tripled the recycling rate (to about 38.9 percent of the total amount of solid waste disposed of) and the cost of trash disposal decreased significantly. Sanford’s recycling rate has dropped by 14 to 18 percent in the three years since voters overturned PAYT, according to the city’s sanitation department.

In the years that followed the repeal, Sanford’s officials and solid waste subcommittee members worked with WasteZero, the company that manufactured the bags for PAYT, to create a new program that would hopefully increase recycling, reduce solid waste disposal costs, and be acceptable to Sanford residents. That result was “More in Return,” the contract which the council approved earlier this year. Under that program, hundreds of thousands of dollars were expected to be rebated back to participating households, with amounts based on how much each household recycled each year.

City officials held numerous neighborhood forums about More in Return, in the hopes of informing citizens about the program, answering their questions and building support. In the end, though, voters went with PAYT, the program they kicked to the curb three years ago.

PAYT is expected to save the city an estimated $115,750 on disposal costs for waste that is diverted to recycling, according to city officials.

What’s next? At a future meeting — but not the one this Tuesday — the city council will vote to approve PAYT to reflect this week’s majority vote and will repeal More in Return. Afterward, the council will assign a date to implement PAYT.

Lastly, voters on Tuesday approved a bond for up to $630,000 for interim financing for site surveys, tests, engineering work, and the development of a conceptual design for a new high school and technical center. The state will reimburse the City of Sanford for these expenses.

A total of 1,579 of the city’s registered voters turned out at the polls on Tuesday. That’s less than 25 percent of the total ballots cast in Sanford during the last gubernatorial election on Nov. 2, 2010, but, according to the new charter, that figure has no bearing on Tuesday’s results. If voters had rejected the city and school budgets on Tuesday, the budgets would have passed, anyway, because fewer voters turned out this week than 25 percent of those who did so in 2010.